‘If I don’t…’
‘Then my foot stays in the door while we ring for the police to come with a search warrant. I wouldn’t advise that – things get broken then.’
‘Why are you here?’
‘Because the electoral roll tells us this is the home of Augustus Henderson Peake.’
‘This is Gus’s place, yes.’
‘You’re inviting us in? Thank you, that’s being sensible.’
She stood aside to let them pass. Willet had done dawn raids in the old Belfast days.
The woman’s confusion, failure to demand credentials and proper explanations, did not surprise him.
‘Are you Peake’s wife?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘What are you then? Tenant, lodger, common-law, partner?’
‘Girlfriend, I suppose you’d call it, maybe just friend. My name’s Meg. If it matters, I’m divorced, I have no children, I’m a junior-school teacher.’
‘It’s not important. Where is he? Where’s Peake?’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t the faintest idea.’
At last, the way it always was, a little spark had come to the woman’s eyes. Ken Willet, captain, detached from his regiment to duty at the Ministry of Defence, heard Ms Manning swear quietly. The woman’s nightdress hung like a heavy, bulky shroud over her body.
‘Maybe I should make a cup of tea,’ Willet said.
‘No, we will.’
It was an instruction. Ms Manning turned and gave him the eye. He understood. The kitchen for the women, and for him the search through the living room and the bedrooms.
Willet had never worked alongside the Security Service before. His telephone had gone an hour and thirty-five minutes earlier. It was about a sniper, he’d been told by the night desk, and he knew a little about sniping – though not as much as he’d have wished – and he’d be picked up. Throwing on his clothes, he’d heard a horn hoot down in the street.
He’d expected a smelly old blighter in a dirty raincoat, his image of a counter-intelligence officer, and she’d reached over, held open the door for him, then accelerated away before he’d settled, before he’d belted up. She’d grumbled all the way down about the assignment, the time, the condition of the car, her rates of pay, the weather… but she drove well and fast.
He started to search. He heard the whistle of the kettle and the clatter of mugs. Carol Manning was expert at her work, and the talk had already begun. He heard the murmur of the woman’s voice.
‘Everything in Gus’s life is about shooting at targets with that old rifle. I’m not complaining, but I come after shooting, way after… I suppose we need each other. We go to the cinema, we watch television, we eat together. Sometimes I stay over, sometimes I don’t – never on a Friday because that’s the night before shooting, never on a Saturday because that’s cleaning the rifle after shooting. I’m just around, whether he notices, whether he doesn’t. It suits me and it suits him, but the shooting’s what matters.’
The silver spoons were thrown carelessly at the back of a drawer, and he didn’t think they’d been polished since the day they were handed out as prizes.
‘He cut his hair short four years ago, not because I asked him to, but because he hadn’t shot well one day and he thought the wind blowing his hair across his face had distracted him. Three years ago, he gave up smoking overnight, not because I wanted him to but he thought it affected his breathing pattern in the moment of aiming and firing. We jog three evenings a week, but that’s because a target marksman needs to be at top fitness. Look, up there, there’s a diet sheet. He barely eats before he shoots so that his stomach’s comfortable. He lives for his shooting. For pure happiness, he should just put up a tent on Stickledown Range, at Bisley, and live there. He’s in this club, the Historic Breech loading and Small-arms Association, and they fire these old rifles. There’s a Martini- Henry and a Mauser, a Mosin-Nagant M1891, a Garand, and the secretary shoots a Sharp’s breech-loader. I know what they’re called because I take a picnic and go with him most times, not that I get any conversation. They’re funny people – nothing wrong with them, they’re decent – and they’re obsessed with these rifles that are a hundred years old. All they talk about when they’re shooting is wind-deflection and the humidity that affects the fall of the bullet, ammunition quality, and holding the zero. Do you know?
They were quite upset when he didn’t turn up for the last club shoot. Jenkins, that’s the secretary, rang me – rather aggressively, I thought – to find out where Gus was, why he hadn’t been there. Was he ill? Why hadn’t he phoned? There’s been complaints from the group that they’d shot poorly because Gus wasn’t there. They shoot at eight hundred yards, right up to a thousand, and Gus wasn’t there, no explanation, and they couldn’t perform – and that was Gus’s fault. He’s the best one amongst them, you see, far and away the best, and they need him. I wouldn’t call them friends, but they lean on each other. They’re all a little sad, really, to an outsider – not that they’d think so.’
In the back of another drawer, not hidden away, was a packet of photographs that showed posed groups of men who held old rifles and stood or knelt as a celebration of comradeship. They were not sorted, not in order, as if they were unimportant and seldom looked at.
‘He’s very ordinary – that’s not a criticism – no interest in making an impression. I met the people he works with at last year’s Christmas party. I think they were quite surprised to see him turn up with a woman… I didn’t tell them, and none of them mentioned the shooting, didn’t know about it. He hardly shares it with me. We were drifting along, a boat on a canal, and then the letter came – you know about the letter, do you?’
First he discovered the keyring, hanging from a thin nail on the underside of the bed’s wooden leg, then the gun cabinet bolted to the wall at the back of the wardrobe. He recognized the Lee Enfield No. 4, with the telescopic sight, and the box of ammunition of match grade with the Full Metal Jacket of cupro-nickel casing. He locked the cabinet, returned the keyring to its hiding place.
‘I’d met him after work, on Newlands Corner. It’s good for running there – it’s wonderful, because you can go for miles, high up and with the wind on you, and the village lights all below you. You run better in the dark, it’s liberating. He was quite chatty on the way home, and I thought I’d stay. We’re not much good, either of us, at the sex bit, but some nights it’s better than others – why am I telling you this? His post was on the mat. There was a letter from his grandfather, and another letter with it. He just sat in his chair and read the other letter again and again, and never showed it me. I didn’t even bother to cook, there was no point, and I went back to my place.’
In an old folder in an unlocked desk, held together with a bulged paper-clip, were the scoring charts. Under the heading ‘ALL-IN SCORE DIAGRAM FOR LONG-RANGE TARGET’ were the tables for wind-deflection, weather conditions, and the target circles.
There were no neat crosses in outer, inner, magpie or bull. All the crosses, on every scoring chart, were in the V-Bull circle, which was sixteen inches in diameter, and the ranges for the charts were eight hundred yards, nine hundred yards and a thousand yards.
He felt a sense of respect.
‘He packed up, it was like he was closing down his life here. I’ve never made demands of Gus, certainly I’ve never pestered him with questions, but I did ask, “What’s it about?
Where’s it from, the letter?” He didn’t answer. I know he went to see his grandfather the next day, but that’s all I know, and that’s nothing… He paid off all his bills. He dealt with everything outstanding. He spent more and more time away, before he finally headed off. I’d be here, and sometimes he’d show up late and dump his stuff in the hall, sometimes his briefcase and sometimes his rucksack. Old people do that, don’t they, when they’re going to go into hospital, deal with everything? We didn’t have much of a life by other people’s standards but, God, I miss him.’
In the hall, on a line of coat-hangers behind a curtain screen, were old, dry, mud-smeared trousers and a patched all-weather coat that hadn’t been cleaned. On a hook was a wide-brimmed, shapeless hat. He noted that there were no boots on the floor below the hangers. Of course, a man would have taken his boots… Later he found tax documents in the name of Peake, Augustus Henderson, and electricity, telephone and gas bills, cheque book stubs and bank statements. He noted the last withdrawal and whistled to himself in surprise – eight thousand pounds taken out and the deposit account almost cleared.
‘I came round two weeks ago. I thought that if he was here I could cook a meal for him. He was packing. It wasn’t a suitcase but the rucksack, and everything he put in was old, should have been thrown away years ago. I
